How the Bloomberg terminal made history | Hacker News Reader

How the Bloomberg terminal made history

fastcompany.com

62 pointsdiegolo30 comments

Surprised this article mentioned chat only once. The secret sauce to Bloomberg's stickiness is their collaboration features via what's know as Instant Bloomberg.

Here's an article about a bunch of banks actually working together to unseat Bloomberg's chat: http://www.cnbc.com/2015/07/21/banks-back-rival-to-bloomberg...

I've got a Symphony account. It's okay I guess, but Bloomberg has the network effect, and that's a very difficult thing to overcome because for at least some period of time you'll be asking people to use multiple communication platforms, at which point, some of them will just revert to their original platform.

I would have to guess once Symphony is proven some of the banks will strongly encourage/require communication with their traders to go through Symphony. or it might be another failed Bloomberg-killer. Will be interesting.

I don't think the first commercial Bloomberg terminal was in 1982, but I could be wrong. Michael Bloomberg was still at Salomon until mid-1981. Maybe there was a prototype sometime in 1982. Merrill didn't invest until 1983 and that's where the early terminal got all the bond data. I don't think it was a big factor in the market until like 88-ish, Salomon launched their Yield Book project to compete around 1988-89. There was some kind of an exclusive with Merrill and/or bad blood with Salomon and they couldn't even buy a terminal.

"Most [job candidates] don’t know a lot about us" That's a disgrace, as a geek I would love to put my hands on a Bloomberg Terminal! Although at $24,000 per year, it won't be any time soon I guess :-)

Most decent universities have a subscription through their econ or business schools.

What you're paying for is live price data. The data delayed by a few minutes is available free.

It's not that complicated. The hard part is making sense of all that numeric information. There are a number of fixed-layout screens you can pull up to follow entire markets broadly, and those come up with one or two hot-key presses. Then, there are standard analyses for individual ticker symbols. There's a news story system. There's a way to load up an Excel spreadsheet and run that, using live Bloomberg data. (Underneath, it's a Windows PC.) Those spreadsheets are typically pre-built by staff at trading firms, specialized for whatever they're doing. The number of keystrokes needed for most queries is very small.

One of the minor Bloomberg features is something like Craigslist, but for rich people. Yachts, rentals in the Hamptons, that sort of thing.

If you push the Help button twice, you get text chat to Bloomberg's help desk.

http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/code/rblpapi.html

> What you're paying for is live price data. The data delayed by a few minutes is available free.

While that's true for stocks and key rates, Bloomberg is all about bonds, and there is really no competition there. And it's not only the market data that's important. Bloomberg provides reference and indicative data on hundreds of thousands (millions?) of fixed income instruments.

Yep, and those bond (and swap) prices are not public prices in the same way as equity prices from exchanges. They're indicative dealer quotes. ALLQ shows a stack of dealer quotes. No other system does this...

Eh, you're a bit off. You can find compiled quotes in lots of places, and individual quotes from any broker or dealer, so there are other systems that do this (maybe none that have exactly ALLQs same dealers giving quotes). But you're right saying that many times these prices are indicative quotes from dealers.

The same could be said for all their FICC offerings. Their equity analysis is also better than other platforms I've used. On top of that, their data on vanilla and exotic derivatives are OK but we had some issues with consistency between broker / market marks and Bloomberg marks for implied volatility on some of the most liquid contracts out there.

One of the first (and largest) SaaS companies!

Wouldn't it be more like HaaS? Hardware as a service? Since they sell the terminals not just the software?

Most install the software on their own hardware. Definitely wasn't the case back in the day hence the moniker "terminal" for the desktop software.

Mostly correct, most financial and commodity institutions I've visited make heavy use of their (extremely expensive) keyboards.

Yeah, I was strictly talking about the software. Keyboard is sort of essential for operation.

Here's an interesting alternative viewpoint about the Bloomberg terminal interface published in 2010.

http://uxmag.com/articles/the-impossible-bloomberg-makeover

From the article:

"Simplifying the interface of the terminal would not be accepted by most users because, as ethnographic studies show, they take pride on manipulating Bloomberg's current "complex" interface...The more painful the UI is, the more satisfied these users are.

The Bloomberg Terminal interface looks terrible, but it allows traders and other users to pretend you need to be experienced and knowledgeable to use it."

Dare I suggest that this tendency to keep software unnecessarily complex is something quite common, particularly in the open source community where attempts to improve ease-of-use are often met with resistance and claims of 'dumbing down'?

Interesting, I think it boils down to the fact that the Bloomberg Terminal interface is not intended for the general public. I think simplifying its UI would be like forcing an experience programmer to use something like SourceTree rather than command-line git: it just wouldn't work for them, they would lose the "muscle memory" acquired over years of typing away commands on a keyboard. On a different note, I am quite wary of some people within the open source community who seem to love their esoteric and unnecessarily complicated UIs.

It's not that hard to use and the support is amazing. You hit the "help" key twice and someone from Bloomberg support calls you.

Have you used one before? The UI is not complicated at all.

AOL had this problem. With paying customers, if you change something in the UI, some segment will hate it and scream and you end up losing customers which is often noticed by corp and immediately remedied.

Also, Traders aren't traditionally known as the most tech savvy people (they live and die on excel), so I doubt there's much complaints on their end.

Even though traders might not be tech savvy in a programming sense, what I've seen of a Bloomberg terminal (briefly, I'm not a trader) is that it's largely keyboard driven, with something similar to a command line, for the same reason that programmers prefer to use the keyboard and command lines: because it's an efficient, powerful use of muscle memory.

Also, it's monospaced, for the same reason programmers want things to be monospaced: because that way anything can be tabular data.

The article the GP linked is just wrong. People aren't opposed changing the terminal interface just because they're masochists. They're against changing the terminal because they have learned some powerful skills with it, and the "Web 2.0"-looking replacement that the designers are proposing has no equivalent of those skills.

The last thing you said is probably the most accurate of the comments so far :) Most simply don't have time / can't be bothered to make these changes when the system works fine as it has for 15 years and you have $5mm PNL swings each day.

To someone proficient on a Bloomberg terminal, it's like emacs or vim. Your hands never leave the keyboard.

Would you call emacs unnecessarily complex?

Sure, but there are also an awful lot of developers using Sublime for good reason.

There's a lot of people using yahoo stocks as well.

I remember reading that in pre-iPhone Japan, this was a big selling point for new phones - that they were puzzles to solve.

> The Bloomberg Terminal interface looks terrible, but it allows traders and other users to pretend you need to be experienced and knowledgeable to use it.

It's actually not too terrible. I kind of like it, and it's not particularly difficult to use. The allure of the Bloomberg terminal is the sheer amount of data that you have instantaneous access to... I know of plenty of other places to get real-time quotes, and company information, but none that have all the info in one place like the Bloomberg terminal.

Please don't make single-issue accounts on HN. Threads here are supposed to be conversations, so we want people to participate as people, not novelties or abstractions. Anonymity is fine, of course.

This.

I find this is a big trap that nerds tend to fall into. We invest a lot of time and effort into tools and systems that have a steep learning curve (unix, vim, emacs) because it is a source of pride to master something that is so difficult and esoteric. Being influencers, we have a strong network effect, and end up perpetuating these systems without considering whether they really are the best way of doing things or whether they can be improved in any way.

As far as Bloomberg is considered, they have a strong financial incentive to do this as well. It raises the switching cost for their users who have invested so much time into mastering their product.

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